I do not understand why the Rev games are well rated. They feel super jank. The zombie animations are so stiff and some of their attacks literally come out of nowhere. There's barely any sense of impact when you shoot them with guns. I understand the Rev games are much lower budget than the mainline REs but then why aren't they recycling mechanics from 4 or 5? Is it because Rev 1 had to work on the 3DS and Rev 2 had to work on the Vita? Either way it doesn't change the fact that the game feels like shit to play, at least to me.

I got to a point where a bunch of zombies swarm you and Claire is supposed to fight them off while Moira very slowly opens a door with her crowbar. I cannot figure out how to get past this point. Maybe I'm missing something but I think I'm just in an unwinnable state. I don't have enough bombs and ammo to kill even half of them and they swarm me. I'm not really interested in replaying from the start to get to that point with more ammo and herbs. This is probably one of those games that's only fun co-op.

The direction of this game is amazing. Taking every memorable moment from the original and recreating them in imaginative and yet familiar ways is so fun.

I though the open world stuff was fine. It's kinda weird to me how people instantly make the comparison to Ubisoft games because it has "towers" I dunno. I guess I just don't consider the concept of touching a button to make other important spot appear on the map to be inherently good or bad? The reason I dislike Ubisoft games is that they're incredibly boring to me, they rarely have compelling characters, the writing is generally dogshit and they pad the hell out of the map with a billion activity icons.

In FFVII Rebirth when you touch a "tower" it reveals a maximum of three icons, often less. The open world is not a giant map, it's 6 relatively small maps seperated by more cutscene heavy setpiece chapters. I think that structure helps with the pace a lot.

The combat system is genuinely the most fun I've had in an RPG in recent years. They greatly expanded the range of gameplay styles. The materia system is really fun to figure out and the character action aspect is top notch.

I loved all the minigames. I think it's fun that most quest aren't just "go at map location and interact with thing". A lot have creative interactions attached to them. They all make you hang out with a member of your party and learn more about them.

I dunno I just don't have anything bad to say about it. When I streamed the game I tried to express all the things that annoyed or disappointed me but in the end they're all just tiny nitpicks about specific moments. I've seen a lot of complaint about the ending being way too "kingdom hearts" like in part 1 and, I don't know how to tell you this but Final Fantasy has been doing this stuff since the NES. I think it might feel weird here because those moments weren't originally meant to be endings within a trilogy.

Maybe it's all nostalgia hitting me very hard. I don't really know what this game feels like for someone who's never played the original but at the end of the day I had fun the entire time and I never put the game down until I was 100% finished. I think the game as a whole is fantastic and I cannot wait for part 3.